{"id":532,"date":"2012-12-17T13:49:29","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T13:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=532"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:21:42","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:21:42","slug":"the-impact-of-homeschooling-comparing-emotional-well-being-in-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"THE IMPACT OF HOMESCHOOLING: Comparing Emotional Well-Being in College"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Cynthia K. Drenovsky and Isaiah Cohen, \u201cThe Impact of Homeschooling on the Adjustment of College Students\u201d in International Social Science Review<\/em> 87, nos. 1&2 (2012): 19-34. [available here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>Drenovsky, a sociology professor<\/a> at Shippensburg University, and Cohen, a former undergraduate student of hers, here present the results of a survey comparing the levels of self esteem and depression between homeschooled and conventionally-schooled college students.\u00a0 After an overly long introduction, Drenovsky and Cohen explain their approach.\u00a0 The crucial factor in surveys like this aiming to compare two populations is the way the samples are obtained.\u00a0 Drenovsky and Cohen\u2019s methodology in this respect is weak.\u00a0 They basically just contacted \u201ca state homeschoolers\u2019 organization\u201d (I presume in Pennsylvania) and obtained the names of 1,500 college students over the age of 18 who had been homeschooled and affiliated with this organization.\u00a0 They tell us nothing about this organization directly, but we learn later that the sample is not exclusively Protestant, so I would guess that they got their names from PA Homeschoolers<\/a>, a longstanding statewide organization run by the Pennsylvania legends Howard and Susan Richman, who are Jewish.<\/p>\n

In addition to the 1,500 surveys sent out to college students in Pennsylvania who were homeschooled, they also sent out 80 surveys to non homeschooled students at \u201ca public four-year university in the Mid-Atlantic region,\u201d which probably means Shippensburg itself.\u00a0 Of this 1,580, only 185 surveys were returned, a dreadful response rate of 11.7%.\u00a0 150 were homeschooled and the other 35 were not.<\/p>\n

So from the outset we have serious problems.\u00a0 An extremely limited sample of homeschoolers from one organization in one state, 90% of whom didn\u2019t even bother to complete the survey, is compared to an even more limited sample of non-homeschooled college students who all attend the same university.\u00a0 To what extent can the results they\u2019re about to report be generalized to the entire population of homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers?\u00a0 In my view, very little.<\/p>\n

Regardless, here\u2019s what they find.\u00a0 On the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the homeschoolers scored about the same as conventionally schooled students.\u00a0 On the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), homeschoolers did better than the conventionally schooled students.\u00a0 The homeschooled group also reported that they had higher grades and were more satisfied with the college experience generally than the conventionally schooled students.\u00a0 The survey also included questions about various activities the students participated in, and the big finding to emerge out of this data is that students who had been in the boy scouts had much lower self esteem and were much more likely to be depressed.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>Usually articles like this end with caveats and admissions of weakness in the data.\u00a0 As this article doesn\u2019t, let me provide that for them.\u00a0 First there are the obvious difficulties with self-report data given in online surveys.\u00a0 The authors don\u2019t say much about their method, but they do say that the representatives of the state homeschoolers\u2019 organization they used \u201crecognized the benefits of this research for the homeschooled population.\u201d\u00a0 (p. 23)\u00a0 Does that mean that when the emails were sent out, this organization (perhaps PA Homeschoolers) talked it up, explaining to the potential subjects that this would be a great way to make homeschooling look good?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s recall that these students were attending all sorts of colleges and universities.\u00a0 Are these schools on average easier or harder than the one institution (presumably Shippensburg) to which all of the non-homeschoolers attended?\u00a0 It\u2019s simply meaningless to compare the grades and rates of satisfaction between homeschoolers attending all kinds of institutions with non-homeschoolers attending only Shippenberg.\u00a0 It would have been better methodologically if Drenovsky and Cohen had limited their homeschool sample to the same university, like Marc Snyder did<\/a> in his fine 2011 dissertation.<\/p>\n

Finally, a word about the Boy Scouts.\u00a0 How many of the students in their sample of 185 had been boy scouts?\u00a0 We are not told.\u00a0 We are told that 72 of the sample were boys.\u00a0 Relatively few boys stay with boy scouts very long.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be really generous and speculate that 15% of the sample were boy scouts.\u00a0 Rounded up, that would be 11 boys, and I really doubt there were even that many.\u00a0 But even if there were, if just two of these boys for whatever reason really struggled with low self esteem and depression, it would bring down the sample enough to incriminate the entire Boy Scouts of America.\u00a0 One would think that a responsible social scientist would point this sort of thing out, but all we read is that<\/p>\n

The results from this study also show that college students who participated in scouting before attending college had lower levels of self-esteem and higher levels of depression.\u00a0 The relationship between scouting and well-being was not hypothesized, but it should be examined in greater depth in future studies. (p. 30)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me conclude by saying that these shortcomings ought not to be blamed on Drenovsky and Cohen alone.\u00a0 The International Social Science Review<\/em> should hold its publications up to more rigorous standards.\u00a0 Any decent peer review process should have pointed these sorts of things out, giving the authors the chance to tighten and nuance their presentation.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Cynthia K. Drenovsky and Isaiah Cohen, \u201cThe Impact of Homeschooling on the Adjustment of College Students\u201d in International Social Science Review 87, nos. 1&2 (2012): 19-34. [available here] Summary: Drenovsky, a sociology professor at Shippensburg University, and Cohen, a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5,422],"tags":[473,471,463,467,468,465,464,472,470,466,469],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collegepostsecondary","category-health","tag-boy-scouts","tag-center-for-epidemiological-studies-depression-scale","tag-cynthia-k-drenovsky","tag-depression","tag-howard-richman","tag-international-social-science-review","tag-isaiah-coehn","tag-marc-snyder","tag-rosenberg-self-esteem-scale","tag-shippensburg-university","tag-susan-richman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}